One of the latest trends in medical diagnosis and treatment is molecular imaging. In molecular imaging, specialized imaging agents or chemical compounds are utilized during a medical imaging procedure for highlighting particular cellular or molecular processes relating to a particular disease state. The molecular imaging agent manufacturer generally recommends a preferred set of acquisition and processing parameters that best enable the analysis of the imaging data. Additionally, post processing is often employed to enhance the physician's perception of clinically relevant features revealed in the imaging data and to quantify the activity level of the molecular imaging agent. In many cases, the post processing methods are customized for a particular molecular imaging agent.
Many research groups and pharmaceutical companies are developing molecular imaging agents that target a specific disease state. It is likely that hundreds to thousands of such agents could have significant clinical utility and be essential to advance personalized medicine. However, the sheer number of these molecular imaging agents and the likelihood that most of them will require the development of complex agent-specific acquisition and image processing applications create serious impediments to the development of molecular imaging agents for clinical applications. Some of these impediments stem from the fact that the architecture and user interfaces of existing commercial platforms may not scale to support a large number of molecular imaging applications, and the expense of developing such large number of applications may be prohibitive, especially to provide for equivalent functionality across the major workstation platforms.
Moreover, the essential step of clinical validation often performed at research hospitals can be a bottleneck. Since commercial imaging workstations in use in the clinic are “closed”, and do not support rapid prototyping and experimentation, the clinical research groups must develop independent solutions on open platforms which do not transfer easily to other clinics, do not take advantage of the features of commercial workstations and cannot be easily ported to commercial platforms for operational use. Furthermore, the post-processing of images has been hampered by variations in the acquisition workflow and post-processed algorithms generally leading to difficulties in comparing results.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and a method for deploying software, e.g., software designed for acquisition and/or post-processing of images related to a particular molecular imaging agent.